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Israel’s Abortion Rate Falls as Birth Control, Traditional Mores Rise
Experts also say fewer young men are seeking to have sex and are surfing the internet instead, including online pornography

Ido Efrati
May 13, 2018

The abortion rate in Israel is dropping consistently for reasons including greater accessibility to birth control and a society becoming more traditional, the Health Ministry said in a new report.

Between 1990 and 2016, the annual ratio of abortions to live births dropped 34 percent – from 150 for every 1,000 live births to 99. The number of abortions for every 1,000 women of fertility age dropped from 13.6 to nine, while the number of requests to pregnancy-termination committees at hospitals tumbled 42 percent, the report said.

Women Across the World Will Die Thanks to Trump’s Misguided Abortion Policies

The Jewish concept of pikuach nefesh instructs us to do everything in our power to save a life, even if it means ignoring biblical law. Why, then, should we sit on our hands while women suffer due to the uninformed and cruel decision of a few white men in America?

by Shira Berman
Jan 29, 2017

U.S. President Donald Trump’s first ten days in office were replete with shocking executive orders and fulfilled campaign promises. One action that reverberated across the globe was the reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy, or the global gag rule as it’s commonly called.

This policy typically prevents international organizations that receive U.S. family planning funds from providing or even discussing abortion, even if done with their own independent funds, since U.S. funds are already prohibited from covering abortion (both domestically and worldwide).

Some back-alley procedures called ‘dangerous,’ undertaken by ‘nurses, dentists’; Health Ministry says it has no figures on phenomenon – ‘How are we supposed to know?’

January 3, 2017

by Marissa Newman, The Times of Israel political correspondent.

Some 15,000 illegal abortions are performed in Israel each year, many by doctors who bypass the official approval process but others by unqualified professionals who could place the lives of women in danger, activists alleged on Monday.

The issue of abortions, which are legal but require the okay of a medical termination panel — which approves nearly all cases — rarely captures headlines in Israel. But two lawmakers caused a stir this week when they convened a Knesset committee meeting Monday urging the inclusion of a religious figure on the panels, spotlighting the issue and drawing a furious response from female opposition Knesset members.

Abortion may be one of the most politically charged issues in the world related to religion – but you’d never know it in Israel. While Israelis are eager to furiously debate nearly anything else involving religion and politics – from kosher standards in the army to buses on Shabbat, to women’s prayer at the Western Wall – there is near-silence on the issue of when life begins in the womb.

The status quo that is clung to so tightly has allowed invasive but relatively permissive abortion laws to remain in place nearly undisturbed for 40 years.

This week, though, in a rare occurrence, a proposal was floated that would invite religious input into abortion decisions – and the reaction was explosive.

An initiative of two Knesset members from both the coalition and the opposition would add clerics to the termination committee from which a woman seeking to end her pregnancy must attain approval.

On Monday, the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality will consider the subject "the need to add clerics to the termination committee." The matter was submitted recently by two different MKs—Rabbi Yehuda Glick (Likud) and Abd al-Hakim Hajj Yahya (Joint List)—in separate applications for a "rapid debate."